Haughey is absolutely wrong to credit Celtic’s Seville run to Dermot Desmond.

Willie Haughey’s remarks on Go Radio about Dermot Desmond, Martin O’Neill and the road to Seville are exactly the kind of Celtic boardroom folklore that gets repeated until some people start treating it like fact. But just because people talk about it as though it is, that doesn’t necessarily make it so. Let’s go over the central claim

He says that Desmond’s funding gave Celtic the cash to reach Seville. He appears to suggest that it was Desmond who personally bankrolled the spending of that time, and which Martin O’Neill enjoyed in his first tenure at the club.

Haughey is trying to convince Celtic fans to join his scheme. He is not going to do it by shilling this particular brand of bullshit.

Because he is not dealing in facts but in a complete distortion of them. His narrative – and that’s what it is; a story designed to paint a particular picture – mixes a few real events with some half-remembered numbers and a heavy dose of foul-smelling excrement. Once you put those claims beside the public record, the whole thing starts to look very flimsy indeed.

The real story is much less romantic.

Celtic plc raised money. Celtic plc borrowed money. It then spent money. Celtic plc carried the debt on its own books. Dermot Desmond was an important investor in that story. He was not a benevolent patron secretly bankrolling Martin O’Neill’s transfer business. That is the crucial distinction, and Haughey’s comments give that impression.

And I am offended by that for two reasons; first, because it is embarrassing for anyone who knows better to claim that Celtic has ever had a sugar-daddy benefactor and it insults the intelligence of all of us who know better and secondly, in attempting to suggest that it was Desmond who ploughed the path to Seville it removes the credit from the people it genuinely belongs to; the manager and the players who actually did it.

Desmond did come in as a significant investor in the post-McCann era. He did buy heavily into Celtic. He did become the dominant individual shareholder.

By the late 1990s he already had a reasonable stake, and in 1999 he increased that stake to 19.8 per cent when he bought 2.8 million shares as Fergus McCann sold down. In 2002, he bought another 2 million ordinary shares, taking his ordinary holding above 20 per cent. Nobody sensible denies that Desmond invested heavily in Celtic.

He did. But let’s be clear; he got significant control for his money. He was not a benefactor for its own sake. He got value in return. Not one penny of Desmond’s ever propped up the playing squad in the way Haughey suggests.

Desmond invested in Celtic as a shareholder. That is not the same thing as personally underwriting transfer spending. Those are two very different claims. Haughey treats them as if they mean the same thing and he knows full well that they don’t.

The biggest distortion in his statement is the line about Desmond having “ploughed 40 million in” during Martin O’Neill’s time and that somehow “(gave) us Seville.” There is no clean public evidence for that claim in the way Haughey clearly intends it. What there is evidence for is a series of share purchases and subscriptions by Desmond, along with club fundraising exercises in which he played a major part.

The most important of those came in 2001 with the convertible share issue.

Celtic announced it publicly. It was an offer for subscription of new Convertible Preferred Ordinary Shares at 125p, aimed at raising up to £25 million. The key detail is the one Haughey’s version skips right over. Celtic’s own announcement said the issue was not being underwritten. This was a corporate fundraising exercise. It was not a private Dermot Desmond transfer fund.

In the end, Celtic raised £22.52 million through that issue, and Desmond subscribed for 8 million of those shares. That made him a major participant in a wider capital raise. It did not make him the man personally paying for Martin O’Neill’s squad.

That is a fantasy built on top of a real event and I cannot but conclude that it is being used as a piece of corporate PR to sell on this idea that Desmond’s association with Celtic has had some major benefit. I cannot see any evidence that it has benefited us in any real way.

He was not the only person who wanted to put in money.

Celtic were also very clear about what the money was for.

The club said at the time that the proceeds would go into the first-team squad, scouting, coaching, training, youth development, multimedia and communications, and other related capital projects. In other words, the money went into the company. The company then decided how to use it. That is a normal corporate finance story. It is not a story about one wealthy shareholder dipping into his own pocket to buy players.

And let me go even further. Celtic’s transfer spending was all paid for through the company books. When we overspent, the company itself was on the hook for that debt, and it was listed and accounted for. It is all there in black and white.

In the 2001 annual report Celtic said it had made a gross investment of £21.9 million in signing seven new players and extending contracts for key players. In the same report, net debt had risen sharply to £29.62 million from £14.5 million the previous year.

Celtic itself linked that rise to investment in the football division. That matters because it shows where the spending sat. It sat in the accounts of Celtic plc. That is not what privately underwritten transfer spending looks like.

If Dermot Desmond had been personally funding players from outside the club, the accounting trail would look very different. Instead, what we see is Celtic spending heavily and carrying the cost on its own balance sheet.

The wider debt picture during that period points in the same direction.

In 2000, Celtic reported net debt of £14.5 million and confirmed major investment in strengthening the first-team squad, including further spending after the year end on players such as Chris Sutton and Joos Valgaeren. In 2002, after the convertible issue had raised £22.52 million, net debt dropped to £16.47 million. Yet Celtic still reported £14.62 million spent on player acquisitions that year.

That is the accounting footprint of a club financing its football operation through its own income, share issues and borrowing. It is not the footprint of a rich individual quietly picking up the tab behind the scenes. The picture Haughey is trying to paint of Desmond as some rich and benevolent benefactor is absolute rubbish and that is a documented fact.

The transfer spending was Celtic’s spending. The debt was Celtic’s debt and the liabilities were Celtic’s liabilities.

There is another line in the accounts that all but kills Haughey’s version stone dead.

Celtic later referred to transfer fees “payable/receivable by the Company.”

Those last three words matter. By the Company. Not by Dermot Desmond or by some off-the-books arrangement. By the Company. Celtic bought the player registrations. Celtic amortised them and Celtic carried the obligations.

So, if anyone wants to claim that Desmond personally underwrote transfer spending, the burden is on them to show evidence for that in the published accounts. What’s in there simply does not reflect that. The public record points the other way.

The only place where underwriting clearly enters the story is later, with the 2005 rights issue. Desmond did agree to underwrite £10 million of a £15 million fundraising exercise. But even that does not rescue Haughey’s argument.

Mainstream reporting from that time made clear that the issue was about the balance sheet and infrastructure, especially youth development.

It was not about funding a spending spree under Gordon Strachan.

So even where Desmond genuinely did underwrite a share issue, it still does not support the idea that he underwrote transfer spending.

Then there are the transfer examples Haughey gives, which are sloppy enough to undermine the whole performance. He talks about a bunch of £6 million signings and he lists a series of players who were purchased for that price.

Chris Sutton at £6 million, fair enough. But Neil Lennon was not a £6 million signing. Alan Thompson was nowhere near that figure. Even Eyal Berkovic was not a £6 million player (and he wasn’t an O’Neil signing anyway, he was signed by Barnes and Dalglish.)

That matters because it shows the quote is not careful recollection. It is misty-eyed inflation. It takes a general truth, that Celtic spent aggressively for a spell, and turns it into a false personalised story about who paid for it.

So let us be precise. Dermot Desmond was an important shareholder. He invested heavily in Celtic shares and he took part in major fundraising exercises. He helped shape the financial backdrop of the modern club. All of that is true.

What is not true, at least not on any public evidence, is the idea that he personally underwrote Celtic’s transfer spending or somehow “gave us Seville.”

Seville did not come from one wealthy man dipping into his pockets. Celtic achieved that by raising capital, carrying debt, investing in players and backing a manager who knew how to build a team capable of reaching a European final.

Dermot Desmond was part of that story. He was not the author of it, and to suggest otherwise is revisionist rubbish designed to make him look good. We should have no part in any narrative that tries to do that.

Haughey says that his plans do not trouble the board. Of course they don’t. They depend, in the first place, on season ticket sales and thus become part of the pitch to get fans to buy them. He may claim that he is operating separate from the club but he does it in such a way that he blurs the line, and he obviously plans to work within the current structure.

But that structure is rotten to the core, and his attempt to build a new foundation myth for it makes me very suspicious of everything he does now. This is definitely not the way to go. That is a very bad start if your intent is to restore trust.

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